Tesseracts Twelve: New Novellas of Canadian Fantastic Fiction

by Claude Lalumiere

  Then Max heard a click, followed by a whine that sounded like a vacuum cleaner cycling up. James stuck his head up. He was holding a narrow plastic hose that ended in a gleaming steel needle. A hissing whistle came from its tip, and Max realized what his dormant survival instinct had been trying to tell him since they showed: these guys weren’t fanboys at all — or, at least, not just fanboys. They were professionals: barrio cosmetic surgeons, the very worst kind.

  Max stirred, trembling toward thoughts of escape.

  Years ago, back when he was a regular on Wylde’s Kingdom, and his day consisted of garrotting gorillas and chainsawing rampaging elephants, that instinct would have seen him clear. It would have thrown Max out of bed and had him halfway to the door before the fanboy-surgeons had a chance to react. If one of them had managed to grab him, he probably could have wrestled the needle of the AbSucker 2020 away from him and jammed it into one fannish orifice or another to break the hold, made it to the door, and dived off the balcony into the bay in the span of a dozen heartbeats.

  But not these days. Max had put on a lot of weight — two-fifty sounded about right, and three hundred wouldn’t really have surprised him — and he hadn’t exactly been physically active during his voluntary convalescence here. So when he grabbed at the needle, the fan pulled it out of the way easily, and speckles of dizziness darkened Max’s vision before he could do anything about it.

  “Don’t stress yourself,” said Dan, who was holding the second hose-and-needle assembly from the AbSucker in one hand. It was hissing, too. Before Max could do anything more, he felt a sharp pain on his left side, and he realized James had managed to skewer him in the love handle. Max felt another prick on his right handle. The AbSucker’s motor whined as it started to work on both sides of him, siphoning off eight months of accumulated lipids like they were a milkshake.

  James tried to be apologetic. He explained that, usually, they’d have him onto their boat in Rio, and if he wanted he could even have had a general anaesthetic and in just under an hour woken up eight months younger, with none of this painful and clearly disturbing fuss. They would have given him a mint.

  “But we were under instructions,” said Dan.

  “Just doing what our boss tells us,” said James.

  “Your boss?” gasped Max.

  James looked down at his own T-shirt, which was emblazoned with a scan of Jerry Wylde, ubiquitous pith-helmet covering his hairless scalp and his antique Sharps hunting rifle slung over one narrow shoulder. Dan looked over at it, too, then back at Max. Dan nodded, his open-mouthed grin an eerie parody of the one Wylde sported on the shirt.

  “Our boss and yours,” said Dan.

  The AbSucker made an ugly whup! sound as something thick passed through the orifice. The way Max was feeling, he thought it might be a testicle.

  “Mr. Wylde wanted everything to be just right,” explained James. “He wanted you to ‘recontextualize.’”

  “And he said you needed to have an ‘adequate sense of danger,’” said Dan.

  “Yeah,” agreed James. “Those were his exact words. ‘Recontextualize.’ ‘An adequate sense of danger.’ Mr. Wylde says that’s when you’re at your best.”

  The three of them were quiet for a moment — James and Dan contemplating the words of the master, Max contemplating the sagging flesh below his ribcage. The noise from the guitar case shifted from suck to slurp, like the milkshake was finished, and James snapped out of it.

  “Shit!” he yelled, and reached down and flipped off the machine. “Almost got your liver,” he said as the sucker cycled down. When Max didn’t laugh, Dan patted him on the shoulder.

  “Joke, Jim,” he said.

  The wind picked up then, and the broken door swung open. Dan hurried to close the door against the returning rage of Atlantica, and Max shut his eyes.

  “I’m not Jim,” he whispered.

  But that wasn’t entirely true. Max was Jim — and Jerry Wylde had made him that way.

  Jerry Wylde and Max had hooked up the year the first hurricane cluster of Atlantica had been tracked. Jerry Wylde was still with Disney, exec-producing a now-defunct celebrity arena show called Let the Games Begin. Max had been working in a string of middling-successful Bollywood sitcoms, the latest of which was an extended-family urban musical actioner called Look Out for Shoorsen!

  With Shoorsen!, Max had managed to achieve just the level of celebrity Let the Games Begin liked best: sufficiently known to pull in a few ratings points, but not so famous their agent could alter even a semi-colon on the standard Disney contract.

  Legend had it Jerry had been the one to pick Max, over the objections of some of the execs who were worried about how Max’s recent, well-publicized bout in rehab would play. But that was crap — Jerry didn’t have anything to do with the decision to make Max a centre-forward in the East-versus-West Five-Ball Sudden-Death Australian-Rules Soccer match. In those days, Jerry Wylde didn’t soil his hands with booking decisions. When the two met in the dressing room, Jerry mistook Max for a member of the camera crew, then, once corrected, faked his way through an embarrassingly inaccurate appreciation of this season’s Shoorsen! and got Max’s name wrong.

  Even in those early days, the one thing Jerry Wylde was not was a detail man: he spent his days pushing the envelope, articulating vision, and that day he had such immense envelope-pushing, vision-articulating plans that he was more preoccupied than usual.

  In his ghostwritten autobiography, Jerry would take an entire chapter to carefully explain how Disney was poised to drop the metaphorical ball on Games, that after just three years in circulation, it was headed for a ratings nosedive, and that what would later become known as the Five-Ball Bloodbath was his honest attempt to inject some life into the ailing property.

  From Jerry’s ghostwritten autobiography, I, Jerry:

  Disney’s problem with Games was the same problem they’d been having since “Steamboat Willie.” They settled into a safe spot that only seemed dangerous, and their Five-Ball Sudden-Death Australian-Rules Soccer spot was a perfect example: divide a pack of mid-level television actors into teams, throw down five balls instead of one, and tell them they can do anything they want to get as many of those balls between the goalposts as they can before the commercial. Ooh, they do sound extreme, those rules: Do anything you want.

  Well, I’ll tell you something: to an actor, doing anything he wants means driving his convertible to his beach house where he’ll screw his actor girlfriend while his agent is signing him for a movie deal that’ll let him take a different actor girlfriend to the Oscars and screw her in a different way when he wins, all of which he regards as nothing more than his God-given due. Kicking a ball into a net in Five-Ball Sudden-Death Australian-Rules Soccer? I don’t care how good actors these guys are; there’s no motivation, and the audience can smell that.

  I could sure smell it — and that’s why I made sure their uniforms were scented a little differently: with what I like to call Eau de Jerry.

  Eau de Jerry was Wylde’s affectionate name for a pheromone soup tailored to drive the five African rhinos Jerry had managed to hide on-set into a mating frenzy.

  None of the actors, of course, had any idea. Billy Kaye, the surgically stunted 26-year-old who’d been playing the same precocious eight-year-old on Ungrateful Bastard for the past eighteen years, did complain in the dressing room that the uniforms had a funny smell to them. But the rest of the team wrote the observation off as more of the overpaid dwarf’s well-documented backstage whining. It was ironic: when the balls dropped and the rhinos charged out, Kaye was one of the first to go down — or up, rather, gored on one of the great beasts’ horns and tossed into the air like a discarded action figure. The Man-Boy Who Cried Rhino, Jerry later dubbed him.

  Seven other celebrities died in the televised bloodbath that followed. Another eleven were maimed, and t
he rest suffered more minor injuries. Or most of the rest did.

  Live on television, Max Fiddler — and only Max Fiddler — came through the ordeal unscathed.

  Emerging from his Serra Do Mar Bay apartment and struggling through the rain toward his psychopathic fans’ limousine, Max still wasn’t sure how he’d survived that bloodbath. He’d seen the tapes enough times: watched himself leap out of the path of a charging rhino, bolt across the pitch to the opposing team’s goalposts, and shimmy up to the top, then jump again when a couple of smitten rhinos rammed into the posts hard enough to knock them down. He saw himself grab onto the bottom of the camera crane that was even then pulling in for the closeup on what could have, should have been his death scene. Max watched as he swung overtop and wrestled the camera operator like he was the last Nazi guard on the truck with the Ark of the Covenant in the back. Max did remember that fight, or at least the feelings it had brought out in him — a strange mix of terror, elation, and vestigial guilt as he finally managed to unstrap the operator from his seat and knock him 25 feet down to the astroturf below. The feelings were there, but the particulars were lost forever. Something within him had taken over and guided him to safety. Max chose to simply call it his survival instinct, but in Wylde’s autobiography the ghostwriter found a better name: “Max Fiddler’s Inner Jim.”

  The ghostwriter hadn’t needed to embellish the events that followed. Jerry had indeed been the first one onto the pitch, before the rhinos were subdued, and he had stood directly underneath the crane smoking a locally banned cigarette, gazing wordlessly up at Max for almost a minute before the floor director, surrounded by three terrified PAs brandishing cattleprods and cellphones, came out to take Wylde off-set and bundle up the camera operator.

  Transcript of the subsequent meeting between Jerry and Max in the Disney World Trauma Center, from I, Jerry (pretty much how Max remembered it, too):

  JERRY: Hello, there. I’m Jerry Wylde.

  JIM: Yes, I believe we have met. Just this afternoon.

  JERRY: And I’m sorry — you are…?

  JIM: Max Fiddler. Look Out for Shoorsen!? Didn’t we have this conversation?

  JERRY: Max Fiddler. Ah, no. You’re Jim. Right?

  JIM: Max Fiddler. I am an actor.

  JERRY: An actor. Listen, Jim — I don’t want you to take this the wrong way, but the one thing you are not is an actor. You have more cojones ‘tween those gams than half of those bozos on the pitch showed today.

  JIM: That is only because your triceratops spread their cojones across the pitch, Mr. Wylde.

  JERRY: You exaggerate. And they are rhinos. Triceratops are dinosaurs, and dinosaurs are extinct. Rhinos are alive and kicking. Where’d you go to school, Jim?

  JIM: Idaho. Why are you calling me Jim? I keep telling you my name is Max Fiddler, that is the name on the contract I signed, which by the way I also read all the way through, and I did not see any mention of rhinos in the—

  JERRY: Whoa, Jim. Settle down. I don’t handle the contracts, and we don’t have a lot of time for me to look into it for you anyway. But listen — let’s cut to the chase. I’ve got some new projects on the horizon — big projects. Stuff that’s going to turn Disney and Fox and the whole goddamn planet on its ear. Hey, riddle me this, Jim: what do you get when you cross a nature show with a fishing show?

  JIM: That would be…

  JERRY: A hunting show! Ex-actly! Do you remember the last time you went hunting — sat in the scrub for hours with your dad’s old M16 and a box of hand grenades, waiting until the moment — the precious, perfect moment that deer shows up in your sights?

  JIM: I’ve never been—

  JERRY: Never been hunting! Of course you haven’t! Who hunts deer these days? I can’t afford the price of a license, and I’m loaded! Okay, how about this: you ever shove firecrackers up a frog’s asshole? Watch that little bastard hop? No? Stick an aerosol can and a cigarette lighter under a wasp’s nest? Hold a magnifying glass over an anthill on a sunny day?

  JIM: Actually, not—

  JERRY: Gahh, you’re shitting me, Jim. I saw you out on that pitch today. That was not a prissy little rhino-hugging second banana from the subcontinent I saw climbing that goalpost. Oh, no. You’re one cold-blooded survivor Jim. You’re a survivor, and you’re more.

  JIM: You tried to kill me.

  JERRY: Yeah, Jim. I guess I did. (Pausing sheepishly) And you know what? I think I succeeded.

  JIM: Huh?

  JERRY: Yeah. I look at you, and I don’t see any trace of that Max Fiddlehead—

  JIM: Fiddler. Max Fiddler.

  JERRY: —Fiddle. Whoever. I don’t see any trace of that guy in you. You’re Jim — the guy that faces five sex-starved African bull rhinos, scales a sheer goal post then leaps — leaps through the air and knocks the camera op out of his seat to dominate the whole show! Forget Look Out for Shoorsen! —from now on, it’s Look Out for Jim, world! Look Out for Fuckin’ Jim!

  At that point, a phalanx of Disney cast members had burst into the room, fired off a taser into Jerry’s ass, and, with nothing but that and a commandeered restraining wheelchair, effectively ended the meeting.

  But the meeting had lasted long enough for Jerry Wylde to leave his mark. As Max lay alone in the dark room, halfway down the biggest adrenaline crash of his life until then, he played Jerry’s words over and over in his head: Look out for Jim. Jerry Wylde was a lunatic, thought Max, and not a particularly unique one either. Look out for Jim, he’d said. The trouble with guys like Jerry Wylde, thought Max, was they figured they could motivate you with nothing more than some meaningless catchphrase— Look out for Jim, for Christ’s sake —and make you dive off a cliff with it. Like that was all it took.

  Max got out of bed. The linoleum floor of the room was cold under his bare feet. They kept these rooms too cool — after three years in New Delhi, Max was used to the heat and he could have stood a little Florida sunshine. Right now, the only light came through the drawn blinds of a single window, and it cast only the faintest, greenish glow over everything.

  “Look out for Jim,” whispered Max. He shuffled over to the window, put his hand on the blind.

  As he did so, there was a terrible crunch! sound, as of breaking glass, followed by the escalating moan of spreading cracks. There was another sound as well, somewhat more distant, and for Max the room got even cooler.

  It was the sound of wind. Big wind. Max inched the curtain back, looked out through the spider-web cracks of the window, and saw just how big a wind could get.

  Three thick-waisted tornadoes were dancing across the Magic Kingdom under a sky green as a frog’s ass. The infirmary was second-storey, and most of his view was blocked by a grass-covered berm, but Max could see the top spires of Sleeping Beauty’s Castle as one of the tornadoes brushed against it. For an instant, it seemed as though the wind was working like a lathe on the fantasy parapet, sending bits of it flying off like woodchips, but then the funnel shifted maybe three dozen feet the wrong way, and the tower disappeared inside it.

  “Look out for Jim,” said Max, as one of the other tornadoes began to grow and moved away, the castle now erased from the skyline. Then something else slammed into the window, shattering it — and once again Max was running, slamming open the door to the hallway, which was already filling up with patients and orderlies and security guards. No-one seemed to notice him as the adrenaline started pumping and his survival instinct — his “inner Jim” — took over.

  “Look out for Jim!” he yelled, and pushed his way into the first stairwell he saw. In no time at all, he was safe in the tunnels under the studio theme park. He would be stuck there for seven and a half days, while Atlantica’s first-ever foray onto the mainland United States reduced eighty percent of Walt Disney World to the swamp and scrub and mud from which it had sprung.

  By the time the job was do
ne on Disney, Max’s agent had done pretty much the same thing to his contract with Shoorsen’s producers in New Delhi. Against his agent’s advice, Max handled the talks with Jerry Wylde himself.

  Episode 1: The Passion of the Vole

  Max took advantage of the screen and mini-bar in the wide seating in back as the two fan-surgeons up front found some dry highway and hauled inland to Rio. The weather was the shits, and Max didn’t want to know about it. So rum cooler in hand, he shut the Weath-Net scribe — which was tracking a tentacular offshoot of Atlantica scraping its way down the coast — and settled on one of the Argentinian sitcom feeds. They were showing the first season of Happy Days, when Joanie was a kid, Fonzie was still a greaser more threatening than lovable, and Ron Howard at least superficially resembled the mid-twentieth-century teenager he was supposed to be playing. It was the only season of the show with any artistic integrity as far as Max was concerned. Although it had been dubbed in Portuguese, he watched it raptly as Dan steered the amphibian over and around the remains of the highway into Rio. He suspected both of the fans were glad he’d found something on the screen. Like most fans Max had encountered through his career, these two ran out of conversation after the first hello.

  Max was glad for the distraction of the screen himself. He hadn’t seen Jerry Wylde — even onscreen — for something like three years. Wylde’s Kingdom had enjoyed a good seven years at the top of the ratings, but now it was faltering and most networks had shunted it to the bottom of the schedule. “I’ll show you an endangered species,” Wylde had said in one of the early promos, in front of a loop of Jim lobbing hand grenades into what Wylde’s team of researchers believed was the last African mountain-gorilla nest in existence. “Now that’s endangered!”